Northwestern Review
Volume 2 | Issue 1
Article 11
2017
Finding Custer: A Review
Douglas Firth Anderson
Northwestern College - Orange City, [email protected]
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Anderson, Douglas Firth (2017) "Finding Custer: A Review," Northwestern Review: Vol. 2 : Iss. 1 , Article 11.
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Finding Custer: A Review
Abstract
This essay reviews T.J. Stiles, Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America.
About the Author
Dr. Doug Anderson specializes in the history of the American West and American religious history. He earned
a doctorate in the latter subject and spent a year studying at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody,
Wyoming.
He is co-author of Pilgrim Progression: The Protestant Experience in California, and his articles and book reviews
have been published in Western Historical Quarterly, Religion and American Culture, and Fides et Historia, as well
as in encyclopedias of the Great Plains and American West.
He has also teamed with other religion scholars on a comprehensive and comparative study of the impact
regions have on religion's role in American public life, which resulted in eight geographically based books.
In 2014, Dr. Anderson co-authored a history of Orange City, Iowa, the town where Northwestern College is
located. Part of the "Images of America" series by Arcadia Publishing, Orange City traces the development of
the town from its founding in 1869 through the present.
This review is available in Northwestern Review: http://nwcommons.nwciowa.edu/northwesternreview/vol2/iss1/11
Northwestern Review, Vol. 2, Issue 1
“Finding Custer: A Review” by Dr. Douglas Firth Anderson
1
Finding Custer: A Review
by Douglas Firth Anderson, Ph.D.
T.J. Stiles, Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2015), 582 pp., illustrations, notes.
Custer is a good day’s drive to the west of Siouxland here.1 It is a town in South Dakota
on the southeast side of the Black Hills.
Central to Custer’s economy is tourism. Custer
the town is not far from Custer State Park.
Also, it is not far from two massive sculptures:
Mt. Rushmore National Memorial (completed)
and Crazy Horse Memorial (in progress).
West from Custer with another day’s
drive is the Little Bighorn Battlefield National
Monument, Montana. Situated amidst the
Crow Indian Reservation, the site was named
the Custer Battlefield National Monument until
Town of Custer, SD. Image from the author.
1
Northwest Iowa and environs is known locally as Siouxland. Some of us even live in Sioux County, which lies in
between Sioux City, Iowa to the south and Sioux Falls, South Dakota to the north. The western border of Sioux
County is the Big Sioux River. Near the center of the county is the town of Sioux Center.
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Northwestern Review, Vol. 2, Issue 1
“Finding Custer: A Review” by Dr. Douglas Firth Anderson
2
an act of Congress in 1991 changed the name to its current one.
Custer, then, is a name layered onto places not far removed from Siouxland. Names on
the landscape can remind us of things that we never knew or that some of us forget and others
can’t.2 Custer—George Armstrong Custer
(1839-1876)—has a name with frisson. That
there is a town and a park named for him in the
Black Hills of South Dakota is understandable
from a white perspective. He led an expedition
in 1874 into the Black Hills that confirmed that
there was gold there.
Custer the romantic military hero.
From an American Indian perspective,
though, Custer’s name on the landscape can be
Brevet Major General George Armstrong
Custer. Image from Library of Congress.
taken as an in-your-face reminder that what is
now the United States was expropriated from
its indigenous peoples—ethnic cleansing by illegal immigrants from Europe. Custer’s expedition
was part of the “dishonorable dealing” (U.S. Supreme Court, United States v. Sioux Nation of
2
See Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1996).
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Northwestern Review, Vol. 2, Issue 1
“Finding Custer: A Review” by Dr. Douglas Firth Anderson
3
Indians, 1980) by which the Black Hills were taken from the Lakota Sioux’s reservation despite
the promises enshrined in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie.3
Custer the vainglorious representative of a racist nation state for which the ends justified
the means.
What then of the removal of his name from the Montana battle site in 1991? This was to
acknowledge that the battlefield is a shrine for the dead of both sides, not just the leader of the
defeated side. (It wasn’t until 2003 that a memorial for the Native American dead was dedicated
at Little Bighorn.)
Custer de-canonized.
Custer, to be sure, has been more than a name on the American landscape. He has been
the subject of illustrators, artists, writers, and filmmakers.4 However, finding a whole and real
Custer amidst all the attention, pro and con, has been difficult—until T.J. Stiles’s new book,
Custer’s Trials.
Stiles won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History for Custer’s Trials.5 As one would expect,
Stiles’s biography is well written. There is substance as well as style, though, in this book. Yet
3
Jeffrey Ostler, The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground (New York: Penguin Viking,
2010), 164.
4
For an idea of the shifting depictions and understandings of Custer, a good place to begin is Part III of Charles E.
Rankin, ed., Legacy: New Perspectives on the Battle of the Little Bighorn (Helena: Montana Historical Society
Press, 1994), 209-319. See also James Welch with Paul Stekler, Killing Custer: The Battle of the Little Bighorn and
the Fate of the Plains Indians (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), which is an enlightening account of the making of
arguably the best documentary about the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Both the documentary and the book rebalance
the event’s historiography through engaging Indian perspectives (including the tribal memories of the Crow Nation,
allies of the U.S., gathered by the late Joseph Medicine Crow) as well as white perspectives.
5
An earlier book of his, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, won not only a Pulitzer but also a
National Book Award. Thus, it wouldn’t surprise me if Custer’s Trials won another award or two.
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Northwestern Review, Vol. 2, Issue 1
“Finding Custer: A Review” by Dr. Douglas Firth Anderson
4
the substance is not new material about Custer. Moreover, he has nothing to add to various
detailed studies of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Rather, his focus is Custer the man—a
contradictory and controversial celebrity. He wants to explain “why his celebrity, and notoriety,
spanned both the Civil War and his years on the frontier” and to “see the man in his totality” to
better “grasp the nature of his contradictions.” Custer, Stiles shows, “had a significance
independent of his demise” (xvi).
The basic structure of the book supports Stiles’s case. Indeed, “case” in the sense of a
courtroom trial or less
formal arraignment is an
important element in
Custer’s story. The book
begins and ends with
trials: the 1861 courtmartial of West Point
cadet Custer for various
infractions at West Point
and the 1879 court of
Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, MT.
Image from the author.
inquiry about the conduct of Major Marcus A. Reno at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. (The
latter “trial” is the way in which Stiles shrewdly deals with Custer’s famous/infamous “demise.”)
Two other trials also receive attention: the 1867 court-martial of Lt. Col. Custer for absence
without leave and conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline and the 1876 refusal of
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Northwestern Review, Vol. 2, Issue 1
“Finding Custer: A Review” by Dr. Douglas Firth Anderson
5
Republican President Grant to allow Custer to be with his 7th Cavalry after Custer’s aid to
Congressional Democrats in investigating War Department corruption. (In response to pleas sent
up the chain of command, Grant finally relented, and Custer thus ended up at the Little Bighorn.)
In short, these trials highlight Custer’s problems with authority—ironic given his career in the
U.S. military.
The other structural element important to Stiles’s biography is what amounts to the first
half of the book: Custer and the Civil War. Without fully examining Custer’s experiences in the
Civil War, his “frontier” activities and celebrity are easily misunderstood. Custer proved to be an
excellent battlefield leader of cavalry. Philip Sheridan, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s most trusted
subordinate next to William T. Sherman, considered Custer his best combat officer. Yet the war
also made clear that outside of combat, Custer was no manager of men. Further, he was a
Democrat who never stopped admiring George B. McClellan, on whose staff he served before
gaining his combat experience. (President Lincoln removed McClelland from command twice;
Lincoln also defeated him in the 1864 presidential election. Custer, like McClellan, had no love
for Lincoln. He admired Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson.) While Custer came to respect
Eliza Brown, the former slave whom he made his cook, he remained a racist and had little
problem supporting white Southerners before, during, and after the war. Finally, Custer was selfabsorbed, self-indulgent, and ambitious. He sought and used patrons early and often, and he was
a nepotist. He gambled—a lot. He did, though, give up alcohol (1862), and he also professed
conversion to Christ (1865). Custer was a flirt and worse, making for a sometimes stormy
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Northwestern Review, Vol. 2, Issue 1
“Finding Custer: A Review” by Dr. Douglas Firth Anderson
6
courtship and marriage with Elizabeth (Libbie) Bacon (it was to make up to her that he got
himself into his second court-martial in 1867).
What Stiles accomplishes, then, is a fresh look at a person we think we know, only to find
that we don’t really know more than half of the story. By the time Custer stopped chasing
Confederates and fame and turned to chasing Indians and financial security, battlefield success
had already shaped him. “His
success taught him many
lessons about himself and the
world,” Stiles observes, but he
would spend the rest of his brief
life “learning that they were all
wrong” (207).
More pointedly, Stiles
Crazy Horse Memorial, Black Hills, SD. Image from the author.
makes a convincing case for
Custer’s significance “independent of his demise:” He was a man who, in the words of Sheridan,
his loyal commander, “had difficulty in adapting himself to his altered position” (302) in a
reconstructed United States. That is, Stiles shows that Custer “never adapted to the very
modernity he helped to create” (xviii). He was a romantic individual in a corporatizing world,
better fitted for the Antebellum era than the Gilded Age. “He was the exaggerated American”
who was “out of time with his times” (xix), making for an unstable and contradictory personality
who lived out many of his insecurities in public. At the Battles of the Washita (1868) and the
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Northwestern Review, Vol. 2, Issue 1
“Finding Custer: A Review” by Dr. Douglas Firth Anderson
7
Little Bighorn, he was no outlier of bloodthirstiness; rather, he made battlefield decisions that
were standard for his military peers. The wars of concentrating and dispossessing American
Indians were morally unjustifiable, but Custer was of his times in this respect.
Near the end of his book, Stiles eloquently summarizes his understanding of Custer’s
significance:
From the Civil War through his two battles on the Yellowstone, he proved decisive, not
reckless; shrewd, not foolish. In every other regard, he danced along the emerging
modern world, unable to adapt to it. He failed in the new sphere of finance, rejected new
thinking about equality, and wrote antiquated prose. He offended his military superiors,
mismanaged subordinates, alienated civilian authorities, meddled inappropriately in
politics, endangered his marriage, and gambled away his estate. Again and again he saved
himself through his ability to fight. And yet, ironically, we now remember him as a bad
commander (455-456).
Custer’s various trials, in short, while exaggerated in their scope and publicness, are not unlike
the trials of other celebrities then and since. Perhaps engaging with change in outsized and
contradictory ways is a peculiarly American cultural preoccupation. If so, Stiles can help us
better come to terms not only with a whole George Armstrong Custer, but with a bit of ourselves.
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